Being awoken by the sound of a tank rolling down your street is something that happens infrequently in the average American’s lifetime, but if it’s an experience that you’re looking to have, be in a Lebanese town on election day. My hotel’s patio faces onto the same street as the town’s polling location, thus last night I was witness to a procession of soldiers, jeeps, and tanks, followed by civilian personnel walking the big white plastic ballot boxes down the street. To this point, I had seen plenty of soldiers, but yesterday was the first time I saw them with their fingers anywhere near their gun’s trigger. Following the election were fireworks, which sounded uncomfortably close to mortar fire, at least at first, until you notice that no one else around you is concerned. The same thing happened in Sidon, we were there for their election day as well, but it was a totally different beast – the entire city was closed, quiet, but there were fireworks that night as well. Here in Bcharré the city acted like it was a holiday – everyone dressed up, was out on the street walking about, etc.
So where is this town with the strange name? We are up in the Mount Lebanon range, behind the town and up up up is Lebanon’s tallest peak, at over 3000m (9500ft). I had little idea that Lebanon was quite this mountainous – and beautiful mountains they are. So Bcharré sits at the end of the long, narrow Qadisha Valley, cupped in the back of its bowl. The views above and below the town are magic: above the town are the famous Cedars of God, one of the last remaining ancient cedar groves in Lebanon; and below is the Qadisha, stunning valley full of fig and cherry trees, really more of a ravine, an impressively verdant and lush ravine, than a valley.
On our first day here we looked like lost tourists trying to find our hotel (indeed, we were), and as typical in Lebanon, if you look lost, people will actively engage you to try to help you out. I can’t count how many acts of assistance we’ve received in this country, not to mention the similarly countless times we’ve heard “welcome to Lebanon” or “hi, how are you?” in English. The people take hospitality to the next level here, which is humorous considering the average reaction of my friends and family to the news I was traveling here (you’re going where??). So this guy helps orient us, turns out he had immigrated to Sydney and was back in Bcharré for the summer. We run into the same guy later that night (small town), and he offers to take us with him up to see the Cedars at sunset. So we drove up in his BMW with his two young daughters (who really liked the town’s pizza place), savoring a view over the valley draped in fog and the soft light of dusk. The next day we went back, courtesy of a soldier with whom we hitched a ride. This time we walked around the cedar grove, a deliciously smelly place, a calm aura about it, really lovely. We walked back to town along the old Bcharré road, full of hairpin turns which afforded great vistas to us pedestrians (this town and our story here is so full of great vistas I’m going to run out of synonyms).
The next day, yesterday, we walked down the valley, another beautiful day of walking and looking, including a trip to a semi-hidden waterfall, and a view into the ravine, cascading walls covered in summer haze, as if the valley disappeared at the end into nothingness. There we received another act of kindness, a ride back up to Bcharré by a guy who lived in the village at the valley floor. We had to turn down two other ride offers when we were relaxing down there, again the Lebanese don’t lack for generosity. His conversation with us largely centered around the question of what two Americans are doing in Lebanon, haven’t your people scared you away from us? (this was a common question for us in Lebanon). He also talked a lot about the local politics, Bcharré is the center of the Maronite Christian population (Catholic group, founded by a priest named Maron who emigrated from Syria to these mountains to found his sect), and Lebanon’s history can to a considerable degree be described as conflict, reconciliation, and cooperation between the Christians (Maronite, Catholic, Greek Orthodox), and Muslims (Shiite and Sunni). There is little intermixing, aside from perhaps Beirut, the south and the Bekkaa Valley are majority Shiite, the north coast Sunni, Chouf is the location of the Druze, and the Qadisha Valley the Christians. The Druze are a particularly fascinating people, I advise Wikipedia’ing them. Lebanon’s political system is described as one of “power sharing,” where the Christians get the presidency, chief of the military, and the head of the treasury, while the Muslims get the all-important prime minister position, thus explaining the lament of our driver that the Christians have lost nearly all power here, a position exacerbated by Christians emigrating out of the country.
Thus with such a balancing act, you get a heavy armed presence at election time, to make sure things do not go astray, a statement which of course contains the implicit understanding that the military itself will not lead things “astray,” but that does not seem to be a worry here. My guess is that this is due to the military’s weakness: there is a reason Hezbollah is capable of carving out its own armed, semi-autonomous territory within Lebanon, and why it was Hezbollah which successfully fended off Israel in 2006, rather than the Lebanese military. These thoughts were reinforced by the four Lebanese soldiers who stayed in our hotel two nights ago, guys who must have been in their early 30s but acted as if they were 12, a quartet of men behaving like little boys, leaving me with the thought “no wonder Hezbollah exists.”
So back to the tourism, this has certainly been our favorite three days of the trip. Between the last time I wrote and today, we also visited Byblos and Tripoli, the former pretty and the latter interesting (in the sense that all Lebanese cities are “interesting” – experiences I am happy to have had, but not a tourist’s dream, though the old souk area of Tripoli was cool). But after spending a week in Lebanon’s cities, a few days in its mountains, in a calm town with clean air (and did I mention the views??) … I should also mention in closing how disorienting yet interesting it is to be in a place where one hears Arabic and yet the skyline is dominated by the spires of Christian churches, to see the Arabic script on church doorways. The mental disconnect there is pretty fun to explore. I do look forward, however, to hearing the call to prayer again. Unlike in Morocco, here it has tended to be very melodic, and occasionally beautiful.
Bcharré sounds amazing. I hope to get there one day.